1. Mises was a paid lobbyist for the "back to business" sector.

2. In the interests of Myrdal transparency, shouldn't Pete explain his relationship to a card-carrying Austro-Fascist (member 282632) and Fascist social club member (406183)?

3. How does Pete feel about von Hayek's (1978) proposed fate for the Constitution of the United States: "I think the phrase ought to read, 'Congress should make no law authorizing government to take any discriminatory measures of coercion.' I think this would make all the other rights unnecessary and create the sort of conditions which I want to see."

4. Those who are summoned to service by aristocratic bells employ idiosyncratic academic standards: does Pete think that the person who relayed an alleged threat from The von Hayek Family to the HOPE editors if they published Melvin Reder's (2000) less-than-comprehensive account of Hayek's anti-Semitism is guilty of "malpractice"?
           
5. Does Pete think that the Austrian who recently threatened a publisher with consequences if they published material adverse to his fund-raising is guilty of "malpractice"?

6. The British government posthumously pardoned Turing (who was persecuted for his homosexuality): why hasn't Pete defended Bartley from Sudha Shenoy's public stoning?   

7. What kind of "penalties" does Pete have in mind for the SHOE list moderator and other "violators": that which Mises imposed on Haberler and Machlup for proposing the use of the foreign exchange price mechanism? Or that which Miseans imposed on Friedman? Or von Hayek's (1992, 223) "justice" - "shooting in cold blood".  

Hayek, F.A. 1992. *The Fortunes of Liberalism Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek Volume 4* Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Peter Klein. 


----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter J Boettke" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, 20 May, 2014 9:14:53 PM
Subject: [SHOE] can we please get back to business


Where is the editor of SHOE list?
?
We get almost daily rants parading as historical scholarship in this thread on Hayek, and people want to know why the subdiscipline of history of economic thought is in trouble.

This list-serve is one of the main vehicles for the exchange of information about new ideas in our field and new opportunities for mutually beneficial intellectual exchange.

Yet we are subjected to "intellectual pollution" instead.

If we have learned anything from the work of the great Lin Ostrom on the managing of the "commons" it is this, we should expect such "intellectual pollution" unless the rules are set up such that (a) limit access, (b) assign responsibility, and (c) introduce graduated penalties for violators of the rules.

I personally would consider the posts that have gone on concerning Hayek to border on intellectual malpractice for a historian of ideas.  That is not because I disagree with their thrust (which I admittedly do) but because of the way they have been presented and asserted.

One of the great benefits of the _scholarly_ community of HES has always been the presumption toward the principle of charitable interpretation.  This enables folks from wildly different intellectual (and ideological) perspectives to have serious conversations -- rather than rant sessions.  One check is to ask yourself if you could pass an ideological Turing Test, another is a more common sense approach which is don't say anything about someone's ideas unless you could be comfortable saying that in from of them.

This a reason that scholars don't just blurt out whatever thoughts come into their head at any moment in time.  Scholarship isn't (and definitely shouldn't be) about stream of consciousness emoting with a keyboard.

Yet this is ALL we are getting in this thread of wild speculation, wild charges, and unbelievable leaps of logic which have the same result on the pursuit of truth as asking someone "so when do you stop beating your wife, sir?"

Can we PLEASE return to the real business of SHOE rather than this?